Since relocating to New York about a year ago, one of the more surprising realities I can't get over is the sheer ubiquity of celebrities -- they're simply everywhere! Walk through any subway train -- from an Inwood-bound A train to a Z train headed for JFK -- and you'll find those stars and starlets shining down on you. Lindsay! Britney! Paris! Lindsay! Brangelina! TomKat! Lindsay! All gloss and glory, beaming at you from the pages of the ever-present In Touch Weekly.

Power lunchers, design majors, single moms, goth queens -- even your own friends and families -- they're all reading these magazines. And don't think it's just women -- fellas are just more sly about it, brandishing blurbs about A-Rod's latest effort while sneaking peeks at Page Six.

Hey, I'm not making this up -- the Audit Bureau of Circulations confirms this celebrity fetish. Figures released yesterday show the gossip glossies are flying off the checkout stands.

OK! Weekly, put out by Britain's private Northern & Shell -- which also publishes some of London's sauciest fishwraps -- saw circulation bound 54% higher during the first half of the year, selling 809,000 copies per issue. Also reporting jumps in circulation were US Weekly (did you know it was founded by The New York Times (NYSE: NYT)? Thanks, Wikipedia!), In Touch Weekly and Life&Style, the latter two both owned by Germany's Bauer Publishing, Europe's largest private publisher. Alas, BloggingStocks' distant Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) relative, People, slipped 2%, though it remains proudly at the top of the heap, with more than 3.7 million copies of each issue sold.

Time, another corporate cousin, saw its genre-leading circulation drop by 700,000 -- apparently owing to its excision of promotional tie-ins that weren't pulling their weight and a redirection away from waiting room subscriptions. Circulation for newsweekly challengers and financial magazines stood pat, with the curious exception of the enigmatic London weekly, The Economist, which posted a 15.5% jump!

So what's on the uptick? Stoic, faceless financial analysis and paparazzi pap! Wrap your head around that.

Magazine sales in general held steady year over year, which is more than the Audit Bureau can say for the newspaper industry, unfortunately. Predictably, among the few major papers to post higher sales in the most recent newspapers report were the tabloid New York Daily News and its rival, The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NYSE: NWS), the new guardian of The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps fearing Jessica Simpson pinups in Rupert's new plaything (Item!), fans of the Journal's gravitas are flocking to The Economist's stuffy pastures.

E.W. Scripps Co. (NYSE:SSP) is one of the few newspaper publishers that Wall Street thanks to its fast-growing Internet and cable businesses. Now, the company may sell off some if not all of its 18 newspapers, which include the Memphis Commercial Appeal and Denver's Rocky Mountain News, according to media reports.

``There might be a better opportunity for these papers to survive with different ownership, certainly with a different capital structure,'' said Scripps Chief Financial Officer Joe Necastro at a Citigroup Inc. investment conference yesterday, according to Bloomberg News. ``We don't want an asset that's generating less cash next year than it is this year."

Who can blame him? Profits of the newspaper business have lagged the rest of Scripps for years. They aren't terrible as newspapers go, but they aren't doing much to help the stock price either, which climbed a whopping 4 percent last year. Investors think Scripps is a well-managed company and are fans of The Home Shopping Network cable channel and the Shopzilla comparison shopping sites. Wall Street, though, has little use for the newspapers owned by Scripps or any other company.

Maybe some of the same private equity players that are in the hunt for Tribune Co. (NYSE:TRB) will be interested in the papers. Gannett Co., (NYSE:GCI), the top newspaper publisher, also will look at some properties as will Dean Singleton's closely held MediaNews Group. Perhaps as in other cities local buyers will emerge. But as I've said before I find it difficult to believe that the new owners will fare much better in dealing with the problems of declining advertising and circulation revenue than the old ones. Scripps, like every other newspaper seller, is going to have dififculty getting good prices for any properties it tries to sell.

Despite the industry's spin, newspapers are a print business. Internet advertising is growing at a healthy rate but that business isn't large enough to make much of a difference to the company's overall bottom line. For newspapers to survive, they are going to need to be in private hands.